A few freebies for you...Reward Of Merit Cards

Still no camera, so I decided to share a few images I found recently.

I picked up some very pretty antique Reward of Merit cards at the flea market this past weekend. 

 Aren't these just the most beautiful cards! I LOVE them. You are welcome to use these images in any personal projects you wish. Please do not include them in any image sets for sale and do not offer them for sale as images but share them freely.

I also found the calling card below...

You lift the right side of the basket to reveal the name underneath. And the name underneath says Charles E. Hall. There is also a name written on the back, Julia Hall. And because I like to know these kinds of things I went looking for these people on ancestry.com and found 3 sets of Charles E. & Julia Hall peoples. 

 http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?MS_AdvCB=1&gl=ROOT_CATEGORY&rank=1&new=1&so=3&MSAV=2&msT=1&gss=ms_r_f-2_s&gsfn=Charles+E&gsfn_x=XO&gsln=Hall&gsln_x=XO&msydy=1900&msydy_x=1&cpxt=1&catBucket=rt&uidh=bjb&cp=12&mssng0=Julia&mssng0_x=1&mssns0=Hall&mssns0_x=1

All could have been the owners of this card as their dates could have been during the time this card would have been used. If only Julia Hall's  middle initial was on the back of this card I would know exactly who had owned it. :(  But being able to narrow it down to 3 is quite impressive I thought. All three are from the northeast part of the states.

These are the things I think about when I find old ephemera and old stuff. Who owned it, where did it come from? What is the story behind this item? It's all very fascinating to me and keeps my mind humming with possibilities.

A Word to the wise

 to get past bloggers new transparent image viewer that pops up when you click an image...

 Very irritating if you ask me. But there is a very easy way around this.

1. First left click the image on my blog, (the transparent "viewer" thingy comes up where you can see all images from that post)

2. Next right click the image you want to print and select "view image" from the resulting window (now the image pops up in it's own window just like it used to, where you can save or print.)